


heaven knows i'm miserable now

by loola



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route Spoilers, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), like literally no comfort at all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:00:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26166028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loola/pseuds/loola
Summary: felix's life told by the different funerals he attends
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Glenn Fraldarius, Felix Hugo Fraldarius & My Unit | Byleth, Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius, Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19





	heaven knows i'm miserable now

the first time felix goes to a funeral, he’s a week old and his mother is dead. he’s too young to remember his brother crying next to him in the pew, too young to remember the chill in the air (it was always cold in faerghus; even colder in fradarius) or the look of misery on his father’s face as he held him. he’ll never remember the nurse taking him away immediately after his birth, his mother too sick to even object, her cries echoing down the hall. and in that sense, felix is lucky. 

a few days later, cornelia finds a cure to the plague spreading across the land and felix is too young to remember how his father cried out, in anger or sadness, grief, all three. 

each year glenn takes him back to the grave so they can pay their respects; when he gets older he brings his friends too. felix feels guilty about that fact that when he thinks of his mother, he imagines the headstone. he envies his brother, who was lucky enough to know her for even a few years before her death. all felix is left with is a block of stone and a portrait in the hallway that he’s too scared to look at. 

he doesn’t like the idea of looking at a dead woman. 

they grow even older, and one night on the five-year anniversary of her funeral, glenn confides in his brother that he can’t remember what their mother looked like, hasn’t in a long time. felix feels a strange sense of joy; finally, they are equal in some way. 

-

soon felix is 13 and sitting at his second funeral. he’s old enough to remember it now, and it hurts.

there’s a large space on the pew between him and his father and he refuses to sit any closer than he already is. his sadness has disappeared and in its place is anger that he’s never known before. he’s so angry it scares even him. his brother is dead. his father is proud. proud of his own child for laying down his life in the name of knighthood. a joke. 

dimitri is on the bench to his left. he can tell he’s looking at him, but he won’t look back. he’s too angry. his brother is dead.

his brother died for dimitri and it was all for nothing. the dimitri felix knew died with him and now he is completely alone. he knows sylvain has friends his age and they go out and have fun without him and ingrid is always too busy meeting new suitors to see him anymore and even dimitri has that duscur boy that follows him everywhere he goes. now that glenn’s gone, his father looks right through him and he realises all at once just how lonely he’s always been.

the day before the funeral, his father had mistaken him for his brother. it was a sudden realisation, like a slap in the face, that he would never be free from his brother’s shadow. no matter what, felix will always just be ‘glenn’s brother’; he’ll never shine as bright, make his father as proud. be strong enough. even as he grows older and better than glenn ever would be, he’ll never be glenn. and he knows glenn is all his father really wants. 

he pushes himself further down the pew, sylvain casts him a weird look; realising that their shoulders are pressed up against each other despite the huge empty space between felix and his father. he decides to ignore him and felix is silently grateful.

the pastor drones on about chivalry and honour; felix waits for him to mention the times glenn would take him and his friends on camping trips in the woods on the outskirts of their territory, telling ghost stories and shaking felix’s tent to scare him in the night, or when he would sit by his bed after a nightmare and sing him back to sleep. 

no one does.

(sylvain assures him after the service that he remembers all those moments and more in detail. he can't tell if he’s being serious or if he just feels bad. knowing sylvain and his terrible memory, he’s lying. but felix can't find it in himself to be mad at his friend for pitying him. he is pitiful.)

glenn was not a saint. far from it. he was fifteen. he was blunt and honest and sometimes just plain mean. never letting felix get away with losing a spar no matter how many advantages he knew he had over him, starting fights with random people just for the sake of proving how strong he was. he was better than most and he knew it, he’d never let you forget it. 

if felix didn’t know better, judging by the way glenn was being described, he would think he had walked into the wrong funeral. he could almost imagine his brother rolling his eyes at the teary-eyed attendees behind them, storming out and disappearing to the training grounds for hours on end instead. 

he wonders if the people sitting around him actually knew anything about his brother at all, or if they’re just mourning another faceless soldier because they had some free time today.

it’s the latter, he knows it. 

his anger is almost blinding.

-

he’s 17 now and older than glenn ever will be. 

he had once childishly warned his brother “just wait until I’m older than you!” he was 5, and an idiot. he didn’t expect him to take it that seriously.

jeralt’s funeral is in three days. he was never that close to him, but their professor’s reaction to his death reminded felix too much of himself five years ago. reminded him of glenn’s bedtime stories about the famous blade breaker. of locking himself away in his room, ignoring sylvain trying to make conversation through the door, ignoring the (very rare) knocks from his father. and, eventually, giving in and opening the door. but he was just letting them into his room; it was too late to get through to him, he wouldn’t let them.

the day before the funeral, professor byleth comes to class for the first time in a week and she looks just about as bad as he had expected her to. she never spoke much, but she seems even quieter today and when she tries to teach him reason, she makes all sorts of mistakes that she never made before; he eventually resorts to teaching himself. every once in a while throughout the day, she’ll begin to tear up and everyone in the class silently agrees to pretend they don’t see it. 

felix understands this, he could not imagine letting anyone see him cry.

at dinner later that day, everyone’s talking about the same thing and felix can’t get away from it. He can't understand why it’s affecting him so much. eventually he snaps when sylvain mentions that this is their first funeral since glenn’s, and he retires to his room for the rest of the evening. 

and when he comes by his room to apologise, felix can’t muster up enough energy to be mad at him. he’s not angry at sylvain, he’s angry at himself for constantly letting the memory of his long dead brother hurt him like this. he’s angry that people die, and he can’t do anything but keep on living and act like it doesn’t affect him. he doesn’t sleep that night; he doesn’t even try.

when the morning comes, felix trains for a few hours before going over to the chapel. professor byleth stands next to him in the front row and cries throughout the entire service; sylvain wraps an arm around her shoulders, felix doesn’t do anything. 

in a strange, bitter way, he envies the professor. he could not imagine mourning his own father. 

-

before he knows it, he’s 22. the world’s gone to shit and the professor is dead, dimitri is too. 

they never had time to give her a proper funeral, one that she deserved, since him and everyone else fighting with him was too busy trying not to get killed right along with her. he lost sight of dimitri almost immediately, he could just make out sylvain’s red hair in the distance and he watched ingrid get shot out of the sky by a stray arrow. by the time he had made it to her and carried her out of the thick of it, edelgard’s reserve troops had successfully helped in invading garreg mach. so, after taking ingrid back to her father’s territory to recover, he had nowhere else to go but home.

in the end, there is no funeral for byleth. she seems to disappear from everyone’s consciousness just as quickly as she had arrived. albeit selfishly, felix is almost thankful for it; he feels like she was the blue lion’s little secret. so when no one brings her up, felix follows suit. 

one day, several years later, a messenger is sent to every noble in faerghus telling them that dimitri has been killed. his father takes it harder than he does.

there’s a small service held for him, felix isn’t sure it can be called a funeral, at least before they were left with glenn’s armour, this time there’s nothing to bury; only the memory of someone who had already died long before his head was removed from his shoulders. ingrid cries on him throughout and he lets her, sylvain for once doesn’t do or say anything. felix can’t work out how he’s meant to feel. for once, he’s not angry or sad, just tired. 

he hears a rumour that gilbert believes dimitri is still alive; felix could have almost laughed if he found it funny. it’s not, though. just hopeless.

he often forgets that him and dimitri were friends at one point in his life. best friends. 

as much as he denied it to himself, he used to genuinely enjoy being near him. they would build tree houses with glenn in the summer and race on the beach; dimitri would let felix win and he would pretend not to notice. and in the winter they would sit with sylvain in his mother’s room and listen to the clicking of her knitting needles as they waited for the heat from the fireplace to melt the snow in their hair. 

but that was back when he was still the younger fraldarius child. when dimitri could sleep through the night and his father was alive and king and felix’s biggest problem was trying to beat his brother when they sparred. before everything seemed to turn against them and he buried the memories and pushed it all away. 

five years after garreg mach fell, sylvain and ingrid drag him back to uphold a promise he had forgotten he made. 

as soon as they arrive he sees a flash of green hair among the swarm of thieves in front of him, another painfully familiar face running ahead, face distorted and crazed like a feral beast. 

a boar.

everyone runs ahead but felix stays lingering behind. he hasn't got the energy to be surprised. 

_obviously_ , he thinks, _it was always going to end this way._

sylvain calls him over and his feet move on their own.

-

his father dies on gronder field and he stands waiting for him to speak to him before he does, look at him, acknowledge his existence for even a second. he doesn’t. 

felix has always known, deep down, that no matter who he became, how strong or brave or smart he was, his father would never see him the way he saw glenn. still, he could never stop himself from trying. now he’s here; his father’s dying, and he still sees right through him. and when it matters most, he has nothing to say. for once he has no snarky retort, no clever remark, he can’t even look at him. 

sylvain asks if he’s alright and felix realises he’s shaking; he can’t tell if it’s from anger or grief or the chill in the air or all three or something else entirely. he doesn’t want to know. he doesn’t want to entertain the thought that he has even the slightest ounce of pity left for him, for a man who never showed he cared in the slightest until it was convenient for him.

he leaves before his father’s body is cold, feeling like he’s about to pass out or cry or throw up and he’s not sure sylvain or dedue or the goddess herself could stop him from killing dimitri if he dared to look up at him. sylvain follows him off the field and they sit in silence for a long time, the rain starts and doesn’t let up and later dimitri comes back carrying his father’s body. his one remaining eye looks clearer than before. he turns to look down at him; felix doesn’t move and doesn’t speak.

dimitri knows better than to take it any further.

felix knows that if this is what it had to take to bring dimitri back, his father would do it again in a heartbeat. he doesn’t know what to think about this revelation, so he doesn’t think about it at all.

the funeral is rushed and short, they haven’t got time to plan every detail, they’re in the middle of a war. in more ways than one, felix is grateful for it. helping his father plan glenn’s funeral was enough for a lifetime. he almost refuses to go at all, but something compels him to, whether it was just the fact that everyone else was going or the need for some sort of closure, he couldn’t tell. 

at some point during the service, someone hands him his father’s sword and he can’t force his brain to register who it is. all he knows is the weight of the blade in his hand and a strange lightness in his head. what is he meant to do with this? he’s still shaking, worse than before. 

he had wanted to see his father dead for most of his adolescence; he still did. he finally got what he wanted and he’s too dizzy to comprehend if his bizarre response is one of extreme happiness or grief. maybe both. maybe this whole time he has just wanted a father who acted like one. 

the words being spoken around him eventually sound just like the rain; his vision becomes so fuzzy that he can’t even see sylvain right beside him. it’s the loneliest he’s felt in years. so alone it hurts.

even with sylvain and ingrid on either side of him, with the professor back and dimitri more like himself than he has been in a decade, nothing rids him of this inescapable loneliness. it’s plagued him since the day that messenger sent him home in a hurry, and he had expected his brother to be there waiting for him when he arrived. since he realised that no matter what, he would always just be a cheap imitation of his long dead brother

as soon as it’s over, felix leaves ahead of the rest. too tired to be angry. too tired to be upset. 

the war continues and ends and dimitri becomes king. 

ingrid is married off to a noble that isn’t glenn and sylvain inherits his house and refuses any proposal that gets thrown at him and felix, against his desires to abandon it all and become a wandering mercenary, becomes duke fraldarius. 

upon returning home, he finds himself face to face with an old portrait and it’s like a stab in the chest, realising that no one pictured is still alive today. 

suddenly he’s five years old again and can’t bring himself to look any longer; there are too many dead people looking at him.

he has the portrait taken down.

**Author's Note:**

> song title from sufjan stevens' 'the only thing'.... literal physical pain i promise you


End file.
